Denise Pope, a lecturer at Stanford University and the author of Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students, says that cheating is highly prevalent and possibly growing among high school students. She identifies two primary reasons for this: 1) Students see examples of cheating for success all around them (e.g., on Wall Street, in politics, in sports, etc.); and 2) they have gotten the impression that their grades matter more than their efforts to learn and grow intellectually.
Her advice to teachers:
Educators can take a number of steps to improve academic integrity in their schools. They can strive for schoolwide buy-in for integrity and honest academic practices, emphasize mastery and learning more than performance and grades, encourage multiple drafts and project-based learning where kids are less likely to cheat, and create a caring classroom climate.
What do you think? Can changing your instructional style reduce cheating?
A version of this news article first appeared in the Teaching Now blog.
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